What we do
Harvest is an onchain yield index tracking DeFi yield strategies across major networks. We collect APY, TVL, share price, and performance data daily, derive 30-day averages and consistency scores from our own indexer, and publish the results as open data via this site.
Origins
We started building Harvest on September 1, 2020, at the height of DeFi summer, when yield farming was emerging as a category but the tools to navigate it didn’t exist. Our goal was specific: automate the moving parts that made yield farming inaccessible to most users. Manual harvesting, gas costs, strategy switching, reward conversion. We built smart-contract vaults that handled all of it, and within a month of launch we were operating one of the largest yield aggregators in DeFi.
That core product still runs. The vaults we deployed in 2020 are still deployed, still compounding, still onchain. Some have been continuously operational for over 2,100 days. The strategies have evolved across hundreds of vault deployments on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and other networks, integrating with Aave, Morpho, Aerodrome, Compound, Curve, Uniswap, and most of the major DeFi protocols of the past five years. The operational model itself has stayed the same: deposits go into a vault, the vault deploys to a yield source, our infrastructure compounds the rewards, depositors withdraw whenever they want.
What changed
What’s changed is what we’ve learned operating that infrastructure for half a decade.
We’ve watched protocols launch, accumulate TVL, deprecate, fork, redeploy, and disappear. We’ve seen APY claims that didn’t match reality and audit reports that didn’t predict failures. We’ve operated through bull cycles, bear cycles, exploit waves, and migration phases. Most of all, we’ve accumulated something most yield platforms don’t have: continuous time-series data on what yield strategies actually delivered, day after day, across multiple market regimes.
That data is what this site is built around now.
The product you’re looking at, the index, the rankings, the methodology, represents a deliberate convergence. We’ve operated yield strategies since 2020. Now we’re publishing what we’ve learned from operating them, in a format anyone can read or cite. The goal is fewer black boxes in DeFi yield and more transparency about what actually works, what doesn’t, and over what time frames.
How we operate today
The current index covers strategies operated by Harvest. We disclose this explicitly because positioning as a “neutral aggregator” while only listing our own products would be misleading. The methodology, risk framework, and ranking logic are designed to apply equally to third-party operators, and expansion to cover them is in development. When that ships, we’ll publish the same data with the same calculations across all operators in scope.
In the meantime, what we publish is honest about its scope: data on Harvest-operated strategies, derived from our own indexer monitoring our own vault contracts, with the calculation methodology fully documented.
We don’t take advertising. We don’t sell premium access to data. We don’t accept payment from protocols to be listed or ranked higher. Operations are funded by performance fees on Harvest-operated vaults, the same model we’ve run under since 2020.
The team
Harvest is built and operated by a distributed group of contributors working across multiple time zones. The protocol launched in 2020 under fair-launch principles: no presale, no venture capital, no pre-mine, no investor allocation. That principle held. Operations have been funded entirely by protocol revenue since day one.
Contributors are identifiable to partners, auditors, and integrators who need to know who they’re working with. Publicly, we communicate through the protocol, the documentation, and the published track record. The credibility we offer is the work itself: 2,100+ days of continuous operation, transparent methodology, open data, and a public record of what we’ve shipped.
What’s next
The direction is visible from the public commits and integrations: continued expansion of the indexer to cover third-party operators, deeper historical data exposure, and more analytical tooling around the data we already have. We don’t operate on quarterly milestones. We ship as the work matures.
If you’re a journalist, integrator, or DeFi participant interested in how we calculate, what we cover, or where the project is headed, see the methodology, or reach out via Twitter or Discord.